SOURCE: "The Legacy of Georges Sorel: Marxism, Violence, Fascism," in Encounter, Vol. XXXIV, No. 2, February, 1970, pp. 47-60.

In the following excerpt, Talmon examines Sorel's legacy on such European contemporaries as Hulme, Lenin, Wyndham Lewis, Ramon Fernandes, and Benedetto Croce.

At a time when words like violence, "direct action," "confrontation," "the bourgeois world," "cleansing," "total destruction," etc. are shouted into our ears with obsessive persistence, there is every justification for (and there may even be some intellectual profit in) taking another look at the most famous European apologist of violence—Georges Sorel. The more so, if one wishes to examine the view (which seems to be implied, for instance, in the title, "The Age of Violence," given to the last chapter of the concluding volume of the New Cambridge Modern History) that the terrorist totalitarian régimes of both Left and Right so characteristic of this century, should not...